Come this January, Co-Optimus will have been in operation for seven years. In that span of time, we’ve added over 2500 games to our database and reviewed over 500 games. Some of these games are great, others… well, why is it that some co-op just doesn’t seem to work? Our staff weighs in on the matter and how co-op can do better.
Encourage Co-Op Behavior
It is natural to think that because a game has a co-op mode or co-op campaign that players will work together to achieve the common goal. After all, the whole point of a “co-op mode” is just as the title suggests: to play the game with others in a cooperative fashion. As all players inherently want to beat the game, it would only be natural to think that there’s no need to encourage cooperative behavior and that that is motivation enough. However, a little bit of encouragement goes a long way.
A percentage of any co-op players’ experience with a random group of other players likely entails playing with someone that is not “exhibiting ideal co-op behavior.” While most players will do their best to work as a team, without a direct form of communication (and oft times there is a hesitancy to hop on the mic with people you don't know) or a specific incentive to cooperate, some players will simply look out for themselves. They will run off and do what they know works and then wonder why the team fails. This is not cooperation; it is a group of players that happen to be playing the same game.
A perfect example of this is PAYDAY 2. The game tosses a group of players into a situation where they have to work together to try and pull off a heist. Things can go very well when working as a carefully coordinated team, or very poorly. The penalty for things going poorly is that the police arrive before any of the heisting has really taken place, but that doesn’t end things right away; the heist can still be completed. The addition of police and SWAT are not enough of a deterrent to guide players into working as a team rather than as a group of four loose cannons looking to score some money. In other words, the game assumes automatic cooperation but has no mechanics in place to truly encourage this idea.
On the other side of this, there’s the Left 4 Dead series. Players are free to run off and do their own thing, but the game actually detects this behavior and will throw a situation at the players that will undoubtedly mean the death of at least that person, if not the entire team. Have this happen once, you might call it a fluke. Two or three times and subtly you are guided towards sticking with the group and working as a team to clear the level. Or, as Sam Tyler summarized it:
Go it alone and die, stay together and the game plays better
The developers did not assume that the premise/setup of the game would be enough to get players to work together. Instead, they added just a few elements that helped to encourage player cooperation.
Just because a game is cooperative, it doesn’t mean players will behave that way. Assuming automatic cooperation is a fallacy and employing subtle mechanics that guide players towards the desired cooperative outcome leads to a better experience overall.
Empower Player Choice Through Diversified Roles
When given a choice, we all have a favorite type of character that we like to play in games. Some of us prefer a walking tank that can absorb anything and dish out hits in return, while others prefer to be the type of hero that boosts their compatriots and weaken foes. Allowing players to choose the role they wish to play and making them unique in that role within a co-op setting goes a long way to building a cohesive team.
This concept is employed most often in MMOs and RPGs, like Wildstar, Diablo, and Divinity: Original Sin, but it also comes up in first-person shooters, like Brink, Borderlands, and the upcoming Destiny. In each of these, players choose the type of character they want to play and, along with that, the types of abilities they have at their disposal and even the types of gear they can use. You’re a tank, a healer, a buffer, a damage-dealer; you BECOME that role. At least, in the best of circumstances.
Players often choose a character class/role based on what it is they believe they will contribute to the team. Take, for instance, the original Guild Wars or World of Warcraft. Players that teamed up into groups (or raid parties) would need to fulfill certain roles in order to progress through content. Every player was valuable, no matter if they were directly dealing damage or not. In Guild Wars, each player was actually capable of fulfilling multiple roles depending on the way they allocated their skills. Tally Callahan, who’s our resident MMO champion, described it thusly:
Maybe this time I want my Ranger to be focused on interrupting devastating spells, or maybe another time I want to focus on pet skills. Maybe I want to go pure damage and use dagger skills with Assassin as my secondary class.
Enabling players to truly feel like their character is their own and they directly contribute to the overall team. Simply having different characters isn’t enough if those characters all basically do the same thing.
Borderlands 2, while a very fun game to play with friends, leans more towards the latter method. While you can choose from six (with the expansions) different classes, all classes more or less do the same thing: shoot bullets from guns. Every class can be built in such a way that they could potentially take on specific roles, i.e., tank, healer, damage dealer, but for much of the game’s content, everyone pretty much falls into the “damage dealer” role. The one thing that varies is the amount of damage each class deals at any given time, thus players may actually regret the character they chose because they see another character dealing more damage in a particular situation. Players are not empowered by their character choice, they are simply exploring different options of the same thing.
By allowing players to choose a class/role that fulfills a specific need within a team, not only does the player feel like they are a valuable member of the team, the team as a whole fits together better.
As Tally puts it:
Just having different classes is not enough to make me happy - I like when, within a class, characters of that class can be radically different from each other based on skill selection. This kind of system speaks co-op to me because I use it to strengthen my group, and give myself a highly customizable role.
Horde/Swarm Modes with Rewards
The Gears of War series brought the term “horde mode” into popular vernacular, despite its existence before that game. While it did help make such a thing popular and actually help to contribute, in its own way, to the “rise of co-op gaming,” it also had an unintended side effect. Specifically, the idea of “slap a horde mode on a game and call it a day.” That’s not enough. To quote Sam again, “If I wanted to face endless hordes of mindless beasts I'll stick to real life thank you.”
The best cases of horde/swarm modes done well are those that combine both of the previous ideas and add a little something extra: rewards for cooperation. Take, for instance, Mass Effect 3’s “Galaxy at War” mode. Players could choose their particular class, with each one helping to fulfill at least some partial role on a team, and only by working together could the three-player teams achieve victory in the mission. While the game did not directly detect and punish “lone wolfs,” players that tried to solo packs of enemies often fell to enemy fire and found staying/working with the group a more effective strategy. Players also felt more of a desire to work together to achieve victory as success in a mission had tangible rewards in the form of “booster packs” and character levels.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that offering rewards is not enough. Doling out riches has to be done in just the right way. Give them out too frequently and players burn through the content, never to return. Give them out not frequently enough (which is the case with Payday 2), and players lose interest or don’t feel motivated enough to work as a team. Striking the right balance between the two ensures players will not only keep playing, but want to keep playing together.
Embrace The Co-Op Experience
All of what’s been discussed so far have been specific mechanics or ideas to incorporate into a game, but there’s one vital idea that cannot be left out: the overall experience. Combining all of the ideas discussed so far definitely helps, but the game still needs that certain element to really bring players together. Marc Allie described it as going “beyond two or more people playing at the same time.” It’s that part of the game that isn’t really a specific part of the design and often times something that comes about through the overall whole.
The best co-op games out there can be broken down into their individual pieces and then restructured into new wholes with different glosses of paint and gameplay mechanics. Yet it is not those pieces that make a co-op game great. The greatest co-op games are those that bring players together, regardless of the type of game, and allows all of them to celebrate in the victory as a team. To truly embrace the benefits of co-op gaming and gaming as a whole.
Our EIC and founder, Nick Puleo, put it best:
It's that feeling you get when you successfully accomplish something after many failures with other folks; the camaraderie it builds. That satisfaction is something that can't be felt in any other type of gaming.